Ternate and Tidore - Kouroo · TERNATE AND TIDORE... ” Ternate and Tidore WALDEN: Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay

“ ... TERNATE AND TIDORE ... ”

Ternate and Tidore

WALDEN: Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants ofCharleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay and Calcutta,drink at my well. In the morning I bathe my intellect in thestupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta, sincewhose composition years of the gods have elapsed, and incomparison with which our modern world and its literature seempuny and trivial; and I doubt if that philosophy is not to bereferred to a previous state of existence, so remote is itssublimity from our conceptions. I lay down the book and go tomy well for water, and lo! there I meet the servantof the Brahmin, priest of Brahma and Vishnu and Indra, who stillsits in his temple on the Ganges reading the Vedas, or dwells atthe root of a tree with his crust and water jug. I meet his servantcome to draw water for his master, and our buckets as it weregrate together in the same well. The pure Walden water is mingledwith the sacred water of the Ganges. With favoring winds it iswafted past the site of the fabulous islands of Atlantis and theHesperides, making the periplus of Hanno, and, floatingby Ternate and Tidore and the mouth of the Persian Gulf, melts inthe tropic gales of the Indian seas, and is landed in ports ofwhich Alexander only heard the names.

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/ActiveIndex.pdf

2 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith

THE SPICE ISLANDS THE SPICE ISLANDS

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By this point, archeologists suspect, humans had begun to notice that certain leaves impart delicious flavor to food.Wild date seed were left in the Shanidar Cave of Northern Iraq. Also found at that site was evidence that

cave dwellers consumed chestnuts, walnuts, pine nuts, and acorns.

50,000 BCE

SPICE

PLANTS

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http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/thumbnails/T/HDT.pdf

http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/explanation.pdf


“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 3


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An archaeological dig at Terqua in Syria has unearthed cloves from an ordinary Mesopotamian household

1,700 BCE








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kitchen dating to this period.

SPICE





The "Black Rose."



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EXODUS records that when the Children of Israel fled from Egypt, they took with them the “principal spices.”

1,520 BCE

SPICE








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The Greeks begin the Olympic Games, at which victors were awarded wreaths of bay laurel leaves, a condiment or spice.

1,453 BCE

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http://www.archive.org/stream/elegantextractso00knoxuoft#page/748/mode/2up



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The Queen of Sheba, paying a royal visit to King Solomon, was accompanied by “camels that bear spices” as her principal host-gift.

Hippocrates wrote numerous treatises on medicinal plants, such as saffron, cinnamon, thyme, coriander, mint, and marjoram.

At about this point Alexandria in the delta of the Nile was becoming the greatest spice trading port of the Eastern Mediterranean, with one of its entrances known as the “Pepper Gate.”

992 BCE

400 BCE

Plant Name PlaceTurnip Brassica rapa Western Asia

Apple Malus Pumila Southwestern Asia

80 BCE

SPICE

PLANTS

OTHERSOTHERS

PLANTS

PEPPER








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In China, there being more than one way to skin a cat, a tax was imposed upon the ownership of slaves.

Hippalus, a Greek sea captain, discovered a method of employing monsoon winds in sailing, a finding that would open direct sea trade between the Eastern Mediterranean and India.

Aelius Gallus, the Egyptian prefect for Augustus Caesar’s Roman empire, went off on an ill-fated expedition to conquer the spice kingdoms of South Arabia.

The funeral rites for Nero’s wife Poppaea at Rome consumed a year’s supply of cinnamon.

Probable date of the earliest surviving cookbook, one by Apicius. The recipes, we note with interest, are richly spiced.

17 CE

24 CE

65 CE

300 CE

SPICE

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SPICE

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On the far side of the earth, cloves were delivered to Constantine — this is the first record of this spice having reached so far. The source, flower buds of Syzygium aromaticum, had of course been known for centuries in the civilized world, for in the Han court etiquette demanded that a person being received by the Chinese emperor hold a clove in his mouth to sweeten the breath.1

335 CE

1. History is silent as to whether these people began to put a clove in their mouth before approaching their Emperor Constantine.

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The "Black Rose."



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August 23: Yet another altercation involving our favorite pushy people, the Romans: in the Sack of Rome, the Visigoths under Alaric defeated the Romans, disrupting the Pax Romana.

Edward Gibbon notwithstanding, the main importance of this event is that it effectively severed the Western

410 CE

Whatgoesaroundkeepscomingaroundandaroundandaround...





It’s so dreary:This is of course the column of Marcus Aurelius in Rome, which is now surmounted by a statue of St. Paul.



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Roman Empire from the Eastern Roman Empire.

The Visigoths had previously obtained 3,000 pounds of pepper as a ransom for Rome, and two years later








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would begin to extract an annual tribute of 300 pounds from the city.

It is customary to say that shock waves ran throughout the Roman world at this event, but actually it is more correct to say that shock waves ran through those citizens of the Roman world prosperous enough to care about expensive symbols of Roman grandeur. A fair number of wealthy Romans fled the city to country estates in Campania, in Sicily, and in north Africa. Enough of them showed up in Hippo for Augustine to warn his flock that they should receive the refugees with open arms and charity.

Not long after the refugees settled on their African estates and began to frequent the salons of Carthage, the more intellectual among them began to wonder aloud whether their new religion might not be to blame for the disaster they had suffered. After all, the argument ran, Rome had been immune from capture for fully eight centuries; but now, just two decades after the formal end of public worship of the pagan gods (commanded by the emperor Theodosius in 391 CE), the city had fallen to the barbarians. Perhaps it was true what pagans had said, that the new Christian god with ideas about turning the other cheek and holding worldly empires in low esteem was not an efficient guardian of the best interests of the ruling class. Most of the people who indulged in these idle speculations were themselves Christian. The “paganism” of these people was no revival of ancient

SPICE





http://www.archive.org/stream/elegantextractso00knoxuoft#page/750/mode/2up



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religion, but only the persistence of the ancient notion of religion as a bargain you struck with the gods in order to preserve your health, wealth, and complacency.

Augustine was invited by the imperial commissioner Marcellinus, who was in Africa to look into the Donatist quarrel for the emperor, to respond to these charges. He knew that it was more than a question of why Rome fell; here were Christians who still did not know what Christianity was about, how it differed from the Roman religions it had replaced. His response was a masterpiece of Christian apologetics, DE CIVITATE DEI (THE CITY OF GOD), whose composition stretched over fifteen years. The first books, consoling those the Visigoths had frightened, were published quickly and seem to have done their job. But the work as a whole continued to come forth in installments, revealing a broad vision of history and Christianity.

At the age of 25, Mohammed married a wealthy spice-trading widow, Khadija, age 40.

Isidore became archbishop of Seville. He would write of the wedding band: “The ring is given by the espouser to the espoused either for a sign of mutual fidelity or still more to join their hearts by this pledge; and therefore the ring is placed on the fourth finger because a certain vein, it is said, flows thence to the heart.”

On the Spice Island of Sumatra, and in Cambodia, would be appearing during this decade the first use of 0, our modern symbol for zero.2

Venice was rising as a commercial power, and much of its trade was in spices. At about this point it was reintroducing pepper into a Europe that had forgotten about this spice. Pepper would become so popular that to describe a family as poor, one would say that they lacked pepper. During the Middle Ages, European consumption of pepper would amount to about 33,000 tons per year.

595 CE

680 CE

2. Prior to this, in China, a blank space had been being used as a placeholder, and in this the Mesopotamians had been copying the Chinese. We have not yet established, precisely when and where this symbol “0” would first come to be understood as itself a number, rather than merely as a placeholder within tables of numbers (and if we ever do establish precisely when and where zero came to be understood as itself a number — we’ll need to ask ourselves just how this makes a rat’s ass worth of difference).

900 CE

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A guild of pepper wholesale merchants, a pepperers’ guild, was founded in London. Later this organization would merge with a spicers’ guild. In 1429 the spicers’ guild would become The Grocers’ Company (the term “grocer” comes from vendre en gros, which is French meaning wholesale). The charter of such organizations was to manage trade in spices, drugs, and dyestuffs: these guild members maintained their exclusive right to “garble” — that is, to select and process spices and medicinal products.

Marco Polo returned from China and described to the Europeans the incredibly precious and strange locales in which their spices were originating.

1180 CE

1298

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The Portuguese Prince Henry established a navigation college to spur a worldwide spice quest.

This Chinese map bears the date 1763, and its inscription alleges that it is copied from a map made in 1418. It does not seem to depict the British Isles, but does depict Africa and Australia:

Well, whaddya know!

1418








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Diaz worked his way around Africa in search of spice and of trade for the Portuguese.

The city of Worms was hosting Germany’s final major chivalric tournament. Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III authorized guild masters to ape the markings of the lower aristocracy: in addition to having their swords at their sides they might put feathers in their caps. At about this time, in Padua, Italy, the fencing master Fillipe Vadi, who taught fencing at Urbino, was creating DE ARTE GLADIATORIA DIMICANDI (ABOUT THE GLADIATORIAL ART OF FIGHTING). This textbook advised its audience of knights and nobles to use their acquired skill to protect rather than oppress. DER HEXENHAMMER (THE HAMMER OF WITCHES), however, taught how to improve one’s aim with projectile weapons by invoking the aid of Satan: steal consecrated wafers from the Mass service, cast your bullets at a crossroad on a Christmas Eve, etc.

January 2, Monday (Old Style): Because the Nasrid ruler of Granada, Muhammad XII Boabdil, had been getting nervous while waiting to abdicate in May as had been agreed to in principle in the previous November, the Christian flag happened to be being raised over the Alhambra for the first time as negotiations began on this day in the tent city without the walls of Granada between the secretary to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, Juan de Colomba, and Father Juan Pérez, a sponsor of the proposal of Christopher Columbus that sailing to the west might well turn up a more direct passage and sources for obtaining for Spain the spice riches of the Orient.3 Retrospectively, the meeting in the siege tents would come to be regarded as of greater long-term significance than this lowering and raising of flags over the fortress palace atop the hill, but at the time there was no question in anybody's mind that it was the flag ceremony which was the significant, albeit off-schedule, incident of this day. It would not be until 1552 that it would be suggested, by Francisco López de Gómara to King Charles V, that the conquest of the Americas that had begun with Columbus had constituted the most significant event since the divine Creation of the universe,

— or, at least, since the 1st Coming of Christ.

I freely admit that, according to white writers, whiteteachers, white historians and white molders of publicopinion, nothing ever happened in the world of anyimportance that could not or should not be labeled

1487

1492

3. He would return with corn (Zea mays) and other crop plants.

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‘white.’— W.E. Burghardt Du Bois, “The Superior Race”

This would turn out to be a key year in the history of tourism. Columbus, or Colon, or Colombo or whatever his name was, had made a serious error in calculating the circumference of the earth which could have gotten a whole bunch of white people, including himself, lost while sailing the ocean blue and dying of thirst. Instead it seems he lucked out. Yes, a whole bunch of people would get killed as a result of this ridiculous miscalculation of his, but, by and large, they wouldn’t be white people. I will make only one further comment on this year: Bartolomé de las Casas reported,4 that what this mass-murder Columbus/Colon/Colombo most craved was “to discover more.” This is the real world, in which, it seems, it is those of us who most crave who are surest to become craven.

4. Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 1951, HISTORIA DE LOS INDIES, Fondo de Cultura Economica, Mexico, Volume I, p.146.








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For the longest time, only a rather small group of Spanish intellectuals and bureaucrats would have any interest in this crazed figure, Christopher the Christ Carrier, who had supposed the hill of the Garden of Eden to be at

the origin of every strong ocean current which he had encountered. The half-mythicized faces of America, such as that of the Emperor Montezuma (Motechuzoma), would for a long time quite overshadow this







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genocidal figure.

November 22, Friday (Old Style): Christopher Columbus arrived at Hispaniola. On this trip he was bringing with him the seed of the lemon, the lime, and the sweet orange trees. He was also introducing sugar cane to the island, and by 1516 the first processed sugar would be shipping from Santo Domingo to Spain. Soon afterward, Portugal would begin importing sugar from Brazil, and so sugar cane would be, as we know, becoming a driving force for the slave trade.

1493

Ethnicity gave Columbus a lobby, a prerequisite to public success inUS culture. The 1850 census reported only 3,679 individuals ofItalian birth. Yet by 1866, Italian-Americans, organized by theSharpshooters’ Association of New York, celebrated the landfall and,within three years, annual festivities were being held inPhiladelphia, St. Louis, Boston, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and SanFrancisco on or around October 12. Italians and Spaniards were justnot enough, however, to turn this celebration into a nationalpractice. Fortunately, ethnicity gave Columbus a second –and morenumerous– group of lobbyists, Irish-Americans. By 1850, there werealready 962,000 Americans claiming Irish descent. Many of themregrouped in organizations like the Knights of Columbus, a fraternalsociety for Catholic males founded in 1881. In less than ten years,community support and the institutional patronage of the Catholicchurch swelled the Knights’ membership. As the association spread inthe northeast with the backing of prominent Irish-Americans,it increasingly emphasized the shaping of “citizen culture.” Columbusplayed a leading role in making citizens out of these immigrants.He provided them with a public example of Catholic devotion and civicvirtue, and thus a powerful rejoinder to the cliché that allegianceto Rome preempted the Catholics’ attachment to the United States.In New Haven, the 1892 celebration of the landing attracted someforty thousand people –including six thousand Knights and a thousand-piece band conducted by the musical director of West Point– in a jointcelebration of holiness and patriotism.

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Page 123 in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s SILENCING THE PAST: POWER AND THE PRODUCTION OF HISTORY (Boston MA: Beacon Press, 1995)



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June 8, Wednesday (Old Style): Christopher Columbus reached the coast of Portugal. He had been gone this time for 2 years, 81/2 months, and was returning with pineapple and allspice (not having ever seen whole

peppercorns, he was supposing this spice berry to be pepper).

1496

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July 8, Saturday (Old Style): The Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama left Lisbon under orders from the King of Portugal, to follow a route discovered by Diaz 11 years before around the Cape of Good Hope. His arrival in India would mark the first voyage from Europe. This trip and the subsequent voyage of Cabral would break the Venetian monopoly on the sugar and the spice trade.

In reference to citrus, Camoes, in recording his voyages to India would write:

A thousand trees are seen towards heaven rising,With beautiful and sweetly-scented apples;The orange, wearing on its lovely fruitThe colour Daphne carried in her hair;Bent low, nay almost fallen to the ground,The citron, heavy with is yellow load;And, last, the graceful lemon with its fruitOf pleasant smell and shaped like virgins’ breasts.

May 20, Sunday (Old Style): The Portuguese captain Vasco da Gama arrived at Calicut on the west coast of India, a spice-trading center; pepper prices would decline in Europe. De Gama’s cargo paid for his expedition sixty times over. (The pepper season begins in Sumatra with the harvesting of small berries near the ground in January. The harvest continues through the spring, with the very finest peppercorns being taken from the tops of the vines during May. Some good pepper reaches the ports along the Acehnese coast of Sumatra even as late as July, and then pepper become unavailable in bulk until the next January. What the pepper traders along this coast desired in exchange was Spanish silver, either in the form of dollars or of pieces of eight, and sacks of these silver coins made excellent ballast for the spice ships on their trip out to Sumatra.)

Venice sent ambassadors to the Sultan of Turkey proposing the construction of a canal across the Isthmus of Suez. Meanwhile, the Portuguese were founding spice factories along the east coast of India.

1497

1498

1504

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PLANTS








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The Portuguese found out about Ceylon, source of treasured cinnamon. Their exploitation of the cinnamon forests would lead to a system of slavery there, and a monopoly on trade in this spice.

Captain Albuquerque seized Malacca on the Malay Peninsula, one of the most important spice ellipuliums. Western explorers discovered that the Molucca Islands (the Spice Islands) were the source of cloves.Having won battles over Muslim forces, the Portuguese advanced their control over spice producing areas of India, Ceylon, Java, Sumatra — and by 1514, the Spice Islands. For nearly 100 years great Portuguese wealth would flow from control of the spice trade.

1505

1511

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September 20, Tuesday (Old Style): King Charles V of Spain (Holy Roman Emperor Charles V) having endorsed the design of Ferdinand Magellan and Ruy Faleiro, after a year’s preparation their fleet, the San Antonio, Trinidad, Concepción, Victoria, and Santiago, sailed out into the Atlantic. With them sailed Magellan’s brother-in-law, Duarte Barbosa. When they would reach the coast of Brazil, they would sail down the South American coast to the Patagonian bay of San Julián, where they would wintered from March to August 1520. The Santiago would be wrecked, and its commander João Serrão and its crew would be taken aboard the other vessels.

1519






http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor




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Captain Magellan was sailing westward instead of eastward from Spain because he was looking for new spice lands. Nearly 3 years later, on September 8, 1522, 18 of the original 250 crewmen (lacking Magellan, who fell in a local combat on the island of Mactan in the Philippines during April 1521) would return to Seville, precisely one day early by their own reckoning, with but one remaining of the five ships that had started. Even given such great losses, the 26 tons of cloves, the sacks of nutmegs, the dried mace, and the cinnamon bark in

the Victoria’s hold, with the load of sandalwood returned to Spain from the very last legs of the voyage, would be enough to cover the entire cost of the expedition. The returning captain, Juan Sebastián de Elcano, would be awarded a pension and assigned a coat of arms that displays two cinnamon sticks, three nutmegs, and 12 cloves. A journal detailing exploits of this voyage would be maintained by Antonio Pigafetta, gentleman-adventurer, and published subsequently as PRIMO VIAGGIO INTORNO AL MONDO.

Hernando Cortes conquered Mexico. While on reconnaissance in southeastern Mexico, his soldiers were the first Europeans to discover the delights of the Aztecan spice, vanilla.

The manufacture of silk was introduced to France.

Pigaphetta, following three years of voyage to the Moluccas, wrote that “in all the islands of the Moluccas there are to be found cloves, ginger, sago which is wood-bread, rice, ...pomegranates, both sweet and sour oranges, lemons...” He also wrote that: “the betel-nut is a fruit which they keep chewing together with flowers of jasmine and orange,” and “the cannibals of the islands...eat no other part of the human body but the heart, uncooked but seasoned with the juice of oranges and lemons.”

1521

1522

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April 22, Thursday (Old Style): In the Treaty of Zaragoza, Spain and Portugal divided their claims in the Pacific by drawing an imaginary line from pole to pole 297 1/2 leagues east of the Moluccas.

In return for the princely sum of 350,000 ducats, King Charles V of Spain ceded to Portugal all rights claimed by Spain in the Spice Islands.

The final day of the 2d diet of Speyer, Germany.

Francis Xavier sailed from Malacca for the Spice Islands.

Dr. Pierre Belon began a journey through Egypt, Asia Minor, Egypt, Arabia and Palestine. He would be gone until 1549.

1529

1546










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Garcia da Orta’s COLLOQUIES ON DRUGS AND SIMPLES OF INDIA, the 1st scientific treatise on oriental spices published in the western world.

September 26, Monday (Old Style): From the Indonesian spice islands, Captain Francis Drake sailed across the Indian Ocean and around the Cape of Good Hope at the bottom of Africa.

Drake returned in the Golden Hinde to Plymouth, England, to make anxious inquiries as to whether Queen Elizabeth were still alive (because he needed for her to protect him against Spanish charges of piracy). Since this round-the-world voyage had stopped off along the way in the Spice Islands, his investors would receive a profit from the spices in his hold, of 4,700%. The royal person would come visit the dashing captain on board his vessel.

1563

1580

SPICE







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King Philip II of Spain sent some of his African slaves to St. Augustine. These were the first African slaves to be landed in North America.

He unified control of the Oriental spice trade eliminating the competition in the sugar, spice, and slave trade that had existed before his takeover of Portugal in 1580.

Europe began to learn about China, in Gonzalez de Mendoza’s history.

Meanwhile, a ship from the West Indies arrived in Europe with the 1st cargo of Jamaican ginger — a breakthrough of great moment had been achieved, in that an oriental spice was being cultivated successfully in the New World, reducing our dependence upon a strange Other.

1581

1585

INTERNATIONAL SLAVE TRADE








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Ralph Lane, 1st governor of Virginia, introduced Sir Walter Raleigh to a device apparently of his own devising, a long-stemmed clay pipe for the smoking of tobacco. In Germany, DE PLANTIS EPITOME UTILISSIMA offered one of the 1st cautions against indiscriminate use of this “violent herb.”

Upon Thomas Hariot’s return to England from the Virginia coast, his patron having fallen into disfavor at the court, he entered the service of Henry Percy, 9th Earl of Northumberland. At Syon House, which was run by the earl’s 2d cousin Thomas Percy, he would become a prolific mathematician and astronomer. He has credit for the theory of refraction.

Gunung Api (4.525°S, 129.871°E; summit elevation 640 meters), the volcano on the island of Banda Api that towers over the spice island of Neira in the Banda Sea, erupted. Gunung Api is the most northeasterly volcano in the Sunda-Banda arc, now part of Indonesia. The island of Banda Api is part of a 6-mile-wide caldera, mostly submerged, that is the northernmost of a chain of volcanos. Gunung Api forms a conical peak at the center of this island. At least two episodes of caldera formation are thought to have occurred, with the arcuate islands of Lonthor and Neira considered to be remnants of the pre-caldera volcanoes. (Historical eruptions have mostly consisted of Strombolian eruptions from the summit crater, but larger explosive eruptions have also occurred and, occasionally, lava flows have reached the coast.)

1586

(man smoking clay pipe)







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Sir Francis Drake, on landing at Roanoke off the coast of what is now North Carolina, heard tales of colonists who had survived on soup made from Sassafras albidum. When he returned to England he took with him what may have been the 1st shipment of this plant. (In 1602 Bartholomew Gosnold would bring more material from the plant to England, and by 1607 it would be in great demand both in English coffeehouses and on the street. The tea was said to cure a wide range of diseases, while the wood was thought to repel insect attack. Today we know that oil of sassafras (once used to flavor root beer but out of use since the early 1960s) is substantially the chemical safrole, now regarded as a definite carcinogen. The most significant commercial use for sassafras today is the manufacture of filé, a powder made from young, dried leaves (they do not contain any safrole) used in the making of gumbo.

In an age dominated by Portuguese carracks and Spanish galleons, that functioned as warships in addition to carrying cargo, the first Dutch fluytschip cargo carrier was launched at Hoorn in the Zuider Zee. This vessel was six times as wide and twice as long, with a nearly flat, rectangular bottom for efficiency in the storage of large quantities of cargo.

In about this year also, the jacht Duyfken was under construction in the Netherlands. This was not a lumbering cargo vessel but a fast, lightly-armed ship suitable for small valuable cargoes and for privateering.

Bakers in Montpellier, France were forced to use bushes to fire their ovens because there remained no forest in the area to supply firewood. Europe would continue to face energy shortages based on dwindling forest reserves. Eventually reliance would move to coal, then to petroleum (remember, even these fossil fuels are based on plant life), which would mark a major shift in the history of civilization, from renewable to non-renewable energy sources.

1595

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The Queen’s printer John Norton had commissioned a Dr. Priest to prepare an English-language translation of a popular herbal by Rembert Dodoens but then, Dr. Priest having died, the press had recruited John Gerard to carry the project through to its completion. Gerard added as-yet-unpublished material by the herbalist l’Obel.

We don’t know how much of this famous GREAT HERBALL, OR GENERALL HISTORIE OF PLANTES of 1597 (the earliest English publication to describe the potatoes of Peru) had been completed by Dr. Priest before he died,

1597

BOTANIZING







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versus how much of this amounted to a fresh contribution by Gerard.

In this year Gerard was appointed Junior Warden of the Barber-Surgeons.

GREAT HERBALL OF 1597

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http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/gerarde/index.html



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This was another poor harvest year in Europe and was the 3d of the three so-called “dear years” of England, during which not only meat but even dairy products were in such low supply that they commanded such a price as to be entirely out of the reach of the poor.5 In these years wheat flour would often need to be augmented by grinding and boiling the root of the cuckoopint, Arum maculatum, until even wheat would become too dear for regular consumption by the poor and the many would shift their menus in the direction of “Horsse corne, beanes, peason, otes, tare and lintels.”6

Willem Barentsz, a Dutch navigator, died on his return from Nova Zembla, having attempted to find a northeast passage to the Spice Islands.

Between this year and 1614, first the British East India Company was chartered by Queen Elizabeth I, and then the Dutch, Danish, and French East India Companies were being founded:

In the first voyage made to the East Indies on account of theEnglish East India Company [1600] there were employed four shipscommanded by Captain James Lancaster, their General, viz. theDragon, having the General and 202 men, the Hector 108 men, theSusan 82 and the Ascension 32. They left England about 18 April;in July the people were taken ill on their passage with thescurvy; by the first of August all the ships except the General’swere so thin of men that they had scarce enough to hand thesails; and upon a contrary wind for fifteen or sixteen days thefew who were well before began also to fall sick. Whence thewant of hands was so great in these ships that the merchants whowere sent to dispose of their cargoes in the East Indies wereobliged to take their turn at the helm and do the sailors dutytill they arrived at Saldanha [near the Cape of Good Hope]; wherethe General sent his boats and went on board himself to assistthe other three ships, who were in so weakly a condition thatthey were hardly able to let fall an anchor without hisassistance. All this time the General’s ship continued prettyhealthy. The reason why his crew was in better health than therest of the ships was owing to the juice of lemons of which theGeneral having brought some bottles to sea, he gave to each, aslong as it lasted, three spoonfuls every morning fasting.By this he cured many of his men and preserved the rest; so thatalthough his ship contained double the number of any of theothers yet (through the mersey of God and to the preservationof the other three ships) he neither had so many men sick, norlost so many as they did.7

5. A. Appleby, FAMINE IN TUDOR AND STUART ENGLAND (Stanford CA: Stanford UP, 1978), page 5.6. J.C. Drummond and A. Wilbraham, THE ENGLISHMAN’S FOOD: A HISTORY OF FIVE CENTURIES OF ENGLISH DIET (London: Jonathan Cape, 1958), page 88.

1600

7. Reverend Samuel Purchas. HAKLYUYTUS POSTHUMUS OR PURCHAS HIS PILGRIMES, OR AS A RELATION OR IOURNALL OF THE BEGINNING AND PROCEEDINGS OF THE ENGLIFH PLANTATION FETTLED AT PLIMOTH, IN NEW-ENGLAND, BY CERTAINE …







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Freed of the Spanish yoke and the intermediary for a vast store of riches from the Eastern hemisphere, Amsterdam suddenly became the most prosperous city of Europe. “They never complain of the pains they take, and go as merrily to the Indies, as if they were going to their Countrey Houses.” Holland’s population would be doubling every decade. Brownists and Jews were welcomed, if not exactly with open arms.

Smoking tobacco was introduced into Turkey, and rapidly took hold despite the fact that clerics were denouncing it. “Puffing in each other’s faces, they made the streets and markets stink,” wrote historian Ibrahim Pecevi.

Sir James Lancaster took four merchant ships to the Spice Islands (eastern Indonesian islands now called the Moluccas). The crew of his flagship, the Red Dragon, received a daily dose of lemon juice from bottles and there was no scurvy aboard that vessel; on the other three merchantmen in this flotilla many of the sailors were lost to scurvy.

Selected as the jacht, or scout, for the “Moluccan Fleet” sailing to the Spice Islands. Duyfken’s captain for this voyage, Willem Cornelisz Schouten, with Le Maire, would later discover and name Cape Horn after the city of Hoorn.

On Christmas day the five ships of the Moluccan Fleet reached Bantam (Banten), Java and encountered a blockading fleet of Portuguese ships totalling eight galleons and twenty-two galleys. They engaged this fleet in intermittent battle until on New Years Day they drove them away. This was a turning point in history: the undisputed dominance of the Iberians (Portuguese and Spanish) in the Spice Trade to Europe was over.

Jean Robin published a catalog for his medicinal herb garden.

1601

SPICE

PLANTS








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Shareholders formed The United (Dutch) East India Company (VOC), with bad consequences for Portuguese traders. The Dutch government granted the newly formed company a monopoly on trade to the Spice Islands. Over the following two centuries, the Company would pay its investors an average annual dividend of 18%. (The profit margins of the English East India Company would be even higher than this.)

The Dutch ship Duyfken was warmly welcomed in Bantam, and was able to repair its battle damage. It surveyed Jakarta Bay, in which the Dutch would later build Batavia their capital in the Indies, and then sailing by way of Tuban, East Java to the Spice Island of Ternate. It loaded cloves at Ternate and proceeded to Banda for a cargo of nutmeg.

It was then sent on a voyage of exploration to the east.

On the voyage home from the Indies, the Duyfken became separated from the larger ships in a storm off Cape Agulhas, southern Africa. Duyfken would reach the Netherlands early in 1603, two months prior to the larger ships.

1602

PLANTS

SPICE





The "Black Rose."



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March: An English pinnacle, doing reconnaissance for the expedition of Captain James Lancaster on behalf of the newly formed British East India Company, came upon the island of Pulan Run in the Banda group, and hoisted their flag on the beach. This island, two and a half miles long by half a mile wide and packed with precious nutmeg trees, in this manner became the 1st colony of England. (The Dutch, on behalf of their East India

Company which had been in existence already for a number of years, had previously established nutmeg outposts on the neighboring spice islands of Neira and Lonthor where they could obtain nutmegs from the natives for a halfpenny the pound — and when retailing them in Europe in the following year could obtain a return on this investment, by one calculation at least, of 32,000%.)

December: The Duyfken set out on a 2d voyage to the Indies, in the VOC fleet of Steven van der Haghen with Willem Janszoon as its skipper.

The fleet of The United (Dutch) East India Company captured two Portuguese ships in the Mozambique Channel and sailed to the Spice Islands by way of India, finally reaching Banten, Java on New Years Eve.

1603

1604

SPICE








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The Duyfken was in the fleet that recaptured the fort of Van Verre at Ambon in the Spice Islands from the Portuguese. Later in the year this ship was selected for another voyage of discovery to the south and east, but first it was sent to Bantam Java for urgently needed provisions.

The Dutch East India Company (the VOC) sent the little ship Duyfken, captained by Willem Janzoon, to search for “south and east lands” beyond the furthest reaches of their known world. Leaving from Banda (Indonesia), Duyfken would reach the Cape York Peninsula and chart 300 kilometers of the coast. This is the 1st historically recorded voyage to Australia. All the inhabited continents of the planet were for the 1st time known to European geography.

Early in 1606 Willem Janszoon and Jan Roosengijn took the Duyfken southeast from Banda to the Kei Islands, then along the south coast of New Guinea, skirting south of the shallow waters around False Cape and then continuing east-southeast until they reached and charted the shores of Australia’s Cape York Peninsula.

The Duyfken may have made a 2d voyage east to Australia. Later in the year it was sent to Java to get supplies for the beleaguered Dutch fortress on Ternate.

1605

1606

1607

SPICE

SPICE







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In the Fellows’ Garden of Christ’s College, the site for which had been purchased in 1554, a mulberry tree was planted in order to boost the English silk industry. This tree is still producing.

The Duyfken engaged in a five-hour battle with three Spanish galleys. In June the Duyfken would be sent with larger ships to capture the fortress of Taffaso on Makian Island. A month later the ship would be brought inside the reef at Ternate for repairs. It seems that to repair the bottom she was pulled over onto her side — but this caused so much further damage that she was judged unrepairable.

Jean Robin and Pierre Valet published the 1st European florilegium, JARDIN DU ROY TRES CHRESTIEN HENRI IV. This would be followed closely by FLORILEGIUM NOVUM (1611-1614) and FLORILEGIUM RENOVATUM (1641) by Jean Theodore de Bry, Besler’s HORTUS EYSTETTENSIS (1613), Emanuel Sweert’s FLORILEGIUM (1612), and HORTUS FLORIDUS by Crispin de Passe (1614). These books covered extensive numbers of horticultural floral forms. For example, Besler’s work included 660 species and more than 400 variants (doubles, variegates, etc.); 400 of his plants had medicinal value, 180 were used in cooking, and 250 were grown principally for ornament. Besler’s book included numerous forms of lilies, campanulas, delphiniums, hollyhocks, scabiosas, iris, tulips, narcissus, roses, hyacinths, and anemones.

A record 116,000-pound shipment of cloves arrived in England.

1608

1609

SPICE

PLANTS

SPICE

PLANTS






The "Black Rose."



HDT WHAT? INDEX

Tea from China was shipped to Europe for the 1st time by the Dutch East India Company.

Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, erupted dangerously. Richard Wickham wrote from England to a Mr. Eaton, his colleague in Macao: “I pray you buy for me a pot of the best sort of chaw [tea] in Meaco, two Fairbowes and Arrows, some half a dozen guilt boxes square for me to put into bark and whatever they cost I will alsoe be willinge accoumpatable unto for them.” [sic] According to Antoine de Monchrétien, “The art of industry had made a masterpiece out of nature’s miscarriage, and the name of that city created out of a bog was Amsterdam”:

God made the World, but the Dutch made Holland.

Their houses they keep cleaner than their bodies, their bodiescleaner than their souls.

He who cannot master the sea is unworthy of the land.

1615

SPICE







HDT WHAT? INDEX

Samuel de Champlain returned to Canada, bringing with him Père Denis Jamay and two other Recollect priests, in addition to a lay brother (Père Caron, one of these men, soon after his arrival proceeded to the country of the Hurons on the Georgian bay). Champlain ascended the Ottawa River for some distance, and, leaving the river, went partly overland and partly by canoe to the eastern shore of Lake Huron, where, embarking, he sailed to its southern extremity; then going overland to the western extremity of Lake Ontario, he explored that lake and the St. Lawrence River until he arrived at the Sorel River. Along the way he made numerous observations for latitude while estimating his longitudes by dead reckoning. Soon afterward he attacked a town held by a tribe belonging to the Iroquois league but, through the insubordination of the Hurons, was repelled and sustained severe wounds. The Huron carried him back to one of their towns and after recovering from his wounds he would visit several tribes, returning to France in the spring of the following year. Henry Thoreau would write later that “Champlain, the founder of Québec, being far up the Ottawa spying out the land and taking notes among the Algonquins, on his way to the Fresh Water Sea since called Lake Huron — observed that the natives made a business of collecting and drying for winter use, a small berry which he called blues, and also raspberries — the former is the common blueberry of those regions, by some considered a variety of our early low blueberry (Vaccinium Pennsylvanicum); and again when near the lake he observes that the natives make a kind of bread of pounded corn sifted and mixed with mashed beans which have been boiled — and sometimes they put dried blueberries and raspberries into it. This was five years before the Pilgrims crossed the Atlantic, and is the first account of huckleberry cake that I know of.”

Batavia, Java was established as headquarters of the Dutch East India Company. Between this year and 1624, the Dutch would be establishing a virtual monopoly over the spice trade in the Moluccas and other Indonesian islands.

1619

CARTOGRAPHY

PLANTS








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Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, erupted dangerously.

The officers of the Massachusetts Company wrote to their Governor John Endecott; — “We have sent grayne for seed, wheat, barley, and rye in the chaff.”

John Endecott brought the first domestic European apple trees to America, planting them on Governors Island in Boston Harbor, an island which is now beneath the runway of Logan International Airport. Imagine the trees of Governor Endecott’s apple orchard interspersed with poles from which hung the bodies of Boston’s pirates, dessicating and rotting in chains and screaming their silent warnings to honest sailors, that they should be most careful to remain honest.

1629

MASSACHUSETTS BAY

APPLES





http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/transclusions/18/90DECADE/92/1892_CharlesFrancisAdams_I.pdf



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The Dutch East Indies Company had perfected its control over its nutmeg monopoly. By the ruthless extirpation of all nutmeg trees not in officially sponsored groves, it ensured that the supply of this spice would

never outstrip the world’s demand for it at a luxury price. Since this commodity was in no sense a necessity of life, surplus was always more to be intercepted than shortage. Distribution control was a money machine.

Although the Portuguese were expelled from their Japanese trade island Deshima, the Dutch would be allowed on-going contact with Japanese traders, at first through Hirado and eventually, in 1641, through Deshima again.

The Dutch occupied Ceylon, forcing villagers to supply quotas of cinnamon (as had the Portuguese previously).

Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, again erupted.

1636

1638

PLANTS








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The Dutch seized Malacca and took control of most spice production in the East.

The British West Indies had a population of 20,000, most of it employed in the growing of sugar cane. During this decade the plant would be being cultivated on the island of Barbados by mixed teams of white and black laborers.

Greenwich Village had been known to Native Americans as, among other variants of the term, Sapponckanican — “tobacco fields,” or “land where the tobacco grows.” Nieuw Amsterdam’s Gov. Wouter Van Twiller had in 1629 appropriated a farm belonging to the Dutch West India Company in the Bossen Bouwery (“Farm in the woods”) area of Manhattan island, and there he had begun growing tobacco. The first Dutch references to the name Sapponckanican appear around this year.

In this year, also, a Dutch church was erected inside the stockade.

The Dutch ousted the Portuguese from Ceylon, thus obtaining control over the cinnamon trade.

They began coffee cultivation in Ceylon.

Sometime during this decade Philip English came to America from the Isle of Jersey. He would become a prominent merchant of Salem, Massachusetts and would control 20 ships that sailed to the Channel Islands, to Newfoundland and Barbados, and to Suriname.

1640

1658

1660

SPICE

PLANTS

SPICE







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Elihu Yale started a spice business, which through corrupt dealings in India would flourish, eventually in 1718 responding from England to a funding request by sending along at various times various cartons of books, volumes which when retailed would provide the substantial sum of £800 for a building at a college in Connecticut. That college eventually would choose to rename itself Yale College in recognition of Mr. Yale’s generous bequest of cartons of books of significant value.

Robert Morison published the first scientific study of a single plant group (the carrot family).

Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, erupted.

Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, erupted.

The first record of the grapefruit in the West Indies was made by Hans Sloane in a catalog of Jamaican plants. It is assumed the grapefruit originated there from chance hybrids between other cultivated citrus. This plant was not introduced to Florida until nearly 1850.

1672

1691

1693

PLANTS

PLANTS








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Van Neck established the initial Dutch trading posts in Banda, Amboina, and Ternate, the original “Spice Islands.”

Gunung Api, the volcano towering over the spice island of Neira, again erupted.

By the end of the 17th Century, the few potato plants fetched from the Andes had created a major Irish crop.8

1699

8. By 1845, approximately 1/3d of the tillable land in Ireland would be devoted to this crop and approximately 2/5ths of the population would be relying upon this tuber, along with skim milk or buttermilk, as their main source for calories and vitamins and minerals and protein. This was not only because potatoes could be grown on marginal land, such as on bogs and on rocky hillsides, but also because, growing underground, the crop was less liable to seizure by the English overlords and tax collectors than, say, an above-ground crop such as wheat or Indian maize, and because the bulk of the potato and the fact that it could not be stored for long periods meant that it functioned better as a local subsistence crop than as a marketable commodity. These righteous overlords were therefore referring to it as “the lazy crop.” The spud was seen to be overly compatible with two things which these notables considered as the notable crimes of the “potato people” — their indolence and their incessant begetting of children.

PLANTS

IRISH POTATO FAMINE





Solanum tuberosum as depicted in 1591 by Gaspard Bauhin



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Towards the end the 17th century, chocolate had made its appearance in Germany. In Prussia at this point in time, Frederick I was “The Man.” His policy of restricting the importation of foreign produce at this point led Frederick to impose a tax on chocolate. Fred knew what government was for. This was going to be his money machine, extracting money from you and injecting it into him. Anyone wishing to pay homage to chocolate’s pleasures needed first to pay to him two thalers, for his permission for them so to do.

Europe first read the “Arabian Nights,” and learned of Sinbad’s spice quest.

1704








HDT WHAT? INDEX

April 12, Sunday (Old Style): Courtesy of the end of the War of Spanish Succession, at 10AM in the marketplace of Utrecht, two cannon were fired and a great cheer went up from the assembled Dutch. Holland was going to transform itself into a countinghouse defended by a fleet.

To keep up prices, large quantities of cloves and nutmegs were burned at Amsterdam. (This, like our current drug traffic, wasn’t about supply, you see; it was about demand.)

May: Poivre sent Provost to check out a small, uninhabited spice island near Ternate, called Miao.

1713

1760

1769

SPICE

SPICE





The "Black Rose."



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An entire year’s supply of nutmegs and cloves was destroyed in Amsterdam on purpose, the goal being the maintaining of high prices. Beginning in the 17th century Dutch traders had gained control of spice production in the Moluccas (at the expense of the Portuguese). Short supply kept prices high enough to create fortunes.

March 8, Thursday: Provost discovered that every spice tree on the island of Miao had been chopped down by the Dutch, in protection of their monopoly.

April 6, Friday: Leopold and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart departed Florence.

A disaffected Dutchman, considering his treatment at the hands of the Dutch EIC, pointed Provost toward the small island of Gueby where, unbeknownst, unchopped, spice trees might be obtained. The natives of this island, who also had reason to detest the EIC, proved to be helpful to the French. The local headman was presented with a French uniform and attired in this costume danced enthusiastically, upon the Dutch flag.

1770

PLANTS






The "Black Rose."



HDT WHAT? INDEX

June 24, Sunday: An associate of Governor Pierre Poivre of Mauritius, named Provost, provided Poivre with 400 rooted nutmeg seedlings, 70 rooted clove seedlings, and thousands of seeds and nuts. By the 1790s these spices

would be growing on Zanzibar, Madagascar, Martinique, and Grenada, and the spice monopoly of the Dutch would be no more. (He at first had obtained only clove seeds and nine nutmeg seedlings and had started a new growing area on the French island with the seven nutmeg seedlings that survived the voyage, which would have amounted to the first breech in Holland’s East Indies monopoly had any of this batch then matured. The spice fortune of Poivre would descend through his widow’s second marriage to become the basis for the American fortune of the Dupont de Nemours family, and its Dupont chemical corporation.)

French explorer Pierre Poivre was able to take propagation material of spices (clove, nutmeg, cinnamon, and black pepper) from the Dutch controlled Molucca Islands to Mauritius and Reunion, breaking the Dutch monopoly.

1773

PLANTS





The "Black Rose."



HDT WHAT? INDEX

The English founded Penang, later to become a major eastern pepper port.

Franz Karl Achard of Berlin, in growing different varieties of beets, discovered a variety that seemed especially sweet. He went “Yummm...” and then “Hmmm....” It would turn out that the sugar content of this root might by careful selective breeding be raised from 8% to more than 20%. Might it be possible for civilized people to obtain the sweetness they felt they needed in their lives from sugar beets rather than from subtropical sugar cane grown by the application of human slavery? Achard would develop the “White Silesian,” ancestor to today’s varieties of sugar beet.

1786

SPICE

SWEETS

WITHOUT

SLAVERY








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Erasmus Darwin’s paper “Mechanical expansion of air” appeared in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society.

Georges Louis Leclerc, comte de Buffon died. He had been succeeded in his post at the Jardin du Roi by the Count de Lacepede, who did research on electricity and in this year published THE NATURAL HISTORY OF OVIPAROUS QUADRUPEDS AND SERPENTS.

Thomas Walter’s FLORA CAROLINIANA was published.

The Linnaean Society was established in London, its first president being the James Edward Smith (1759-1828) who, with Sir Joseph Banks’s (1743-1820) encouragement, had in 1784 purchased Carl von Linné’s

1788

BOTANIZING







HDT WHAT? INDEX

library and herbarium.

President Smith would champion the Linnaean system for the next half century even after it had outlived its usefulness. Robert Brown (1773-1858) and John Lindley (1799-1865) would lead the opposition to this retro-thinking. In France, the changes in social values brought about by the Revolution of 1789 coincided with the acceptance of a natural system of classification: Antoine Laurent de Jussieu (1748-1836), nephew of Bernard de Jussieu and friend of Linné, in 1789 in his GENERA PLANTARUM... (Paris), would arrange the genera of the world’s plants into 100 families (ordines naturales) based on concepts developed by his uncle Bernard, in a continuation of the ideas proposed a generation before by Michel Adanson (1727-1806) in FAMILLES DES PLANTES (2 vols., Paris, 1763[-1764]). As had Pierre Magnol (1638-1715), Sloane’s professor, long before him, Adanson believed that plants could be arranged into natural families and genera in a classification scheme free of a priori weighting and metaphysical themes, based solely upon empirical observation of similarities and dissimilarities.

Jean Senebier, in his EXPÉRIENCES SUR L’ACTION DE LA LUMIÈRE SOLAIRE DANS LA VÉGÉTATION established the relationship between the presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and the production of oxygen by plants. His studies built on the work of Ingenhousz.

According to Charles Corn’s THE SCENTS OF EDEN: A HISTORY OF THE SPICE TRADE (NY: Kodansha America, 1999), pages 243-4:

[O]n a spring morning in 1788, the one-hundred-ton Cadet, builtat Pembroke on the North River, glided down Salem’s harbor“bound for Madeira and from thence to India and the China Seas:Prosperous be her voyage,” according to the Salem Mercury ofApril 15. The daily newspaper celebrated the small brig’s leave-taking as it did that of most ships, because in Salem her beingfitted out for parts unknown was the sort of pulsating news uponwhich the port thrived during the heady days after theRevolution. The Cadet, once owned by Derby, now belonged to thesame William Vans who had sailed with Ebenezer West to Cantonin 1785. Vans was aboard again as supercargo, while the brig wascommanded by Vans’s brother-in-law Jonathan Carnes, who wasthirty years old. A month later the Cadet made Madeira, and then

CAROLUS LINNAEUS

PLANTS






Carl Linné is Carl von Linné is Carolus Linnaeus, got that?



HDT WHAT? INDEX

she suddenly disappeared, presumably somewhere in Eastern seas— the Indian Ocean or perhaps beyond. Not one of the other halfdozen Salem ships in that part of the world could account forher whereabouts. Then, on May 18, 1790, more than two yearslater, the Salem Gazette finally reported, “Captain Carnes,absent on an India voyage upwards of two years, was at the Capeof Good Hope, February 14, 1790, and was to sail in a few daysfor the W. Indies.” But where Carnes’s voyage had taken himremained a mystery. That he had sailed thirteen thousand milesto unknown Sumatra was this young captain’s secret.... There areconflicting stories as to what happened next, for there is nosurviving log. Nor are there letters home from crew members, andthe Salem papers do not mention the Cadet’s return, an unusualomission. With the paucity of records, one can only speculateon the fate of the Cadet, which remains largely a mystery. Carnesmost certainly left the Cape with a fully laden ship to ride aneasterly wind back across the Atlantic toward the Caribbean. Alikely explanation, though it is by no means conclusive, is thatthe brig and her cargo were lost on a reef in the West Indies.We know only that somehow Carnes found his way back to Salemwith tales of the strangest race of people he had ever seen. Butmost important, he returned with a profoundly rich secret: theopening of a new channel of trade in pepper, which, to say theleast, was arcane cargo in this brash new nation.

Baptist Reverend Elijah Craig of Scott County, Kentucky, is given credit for first aging Kentucky corn whiskey, thus creating America’s first bourbon whiskey.

Ginkgo was planted at Pierce Arboretum (now part of Longwood Gardens) in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. By 1968 that tree was 105 feet tall and about 13 feet dbh.9

According to Charles Corn’s THE SCENTS OF EDEN: A HISTORY OF THE SPICE TRADE (NY: Kodansha America, 1999), pages 231-6:

Early one fine morning in 1789, not long after his inaugurationon April 30 at New York City’s Wall Street, George Washingtondeparted Boston for Salem, Massachusetts, in a large four-horsecoach, followed by a baggage wagon with black lackeys andoutriders in rich livery, his white horse haltered behind. Theirpace was brisk, for this was another leg of a continuing journeythrough New England, and there were engagements planned for theday. Standing aloof from party divisions, the unanimouslyelected nations’ first chief executive was keen to emphasize hisrole as president of the entire country by a tour through the

1789

9. When measuring trees, the convention is to take their diameter at breast height, four and a half feet above the ground. This is referred to as the “dbh” measurement.

SPICE

PLANTS







HDT WHAT? INDEX

northern states, as later he would travel through the South. Thepresident was especially enthusiastic about visiting Salem, forthere was a strange, unprecedented force at work in this modestNew England port that had all but overshadowed its largerneighbor, Boston, just a few miles to the southeast. In time,the successes of the two ports would be reversed. In themeanwhile, while Boston’s day was yet to come, foreign trade hadfor more than a century brought great wealth to Salem, and theinfluence of the Washington administration would see itcontinued. When the Salem Federal Custom House was opened in1789, the vast seas east of the Cape of Good Hope awaitedexploitation by Salem’s merchants. Though the British, havingeclipsed the Dutch, still traded in spices, the disseminationof clove and nutmeg seedlings had already reduced the dearth ofthe “holy trinity.” Likewise, the pepper trade was for theEnglish a routine commerce in this bustling era, when tea andopium commanded a premium. But for the traders of Salem,Massachusetts, pepper, as we shall see, was anything but aroutine commerce. It was two-o’clock in the afternoon when thefifty-seven-year-old president stepped down from the coach onSalem’s Federal Street to take in his large hands the reins ofhis horse, already bridled and saddled. His party looked on,enjoying the ease and authority with which the old generalplaced his foot in the stirrup and swung his sturdy-shouldered,six-foot three-inch frame atop his old charger. Washington, anexperienced rider and foxhunter since his youth, was at home onhorseback and cut a commanding figure. People liked to watch himride. The, preceded by an honor guard, the former head of thecolonial forces rode up the line in review of the troops toBoston Street. Since the bleakest days of the Revolution, whenMassachusetts troops had stood firmly in support of him, aVirginian, thus solidifying the link between the two mostpowerful colonies, Washington had maintained close ties to thisport city. Hurrahs rang out as the president appeared on thebalcony at Town House Square to receive a welcoming address andto hear a choir sing an ode composed for the occasion. Washingtonmade a brief reply, ending with these words: “From your ownindustry and enterprise, you have everything to hope thatdeserving men and great citizens can expect. May your navigationand commerce flourish, your industry in all its applications berewarded, your happiness here be as perfect as belongs to thelot of humanity, and your eternal felicity be complete.” Whenhe had finished, a chorus of loud cheers went up. The cheeringdin followed Washington as he retired from the Town Housebalcony to the home of Joshua Ward, one of the city’s mostdistinguished merchants. Ward’s house was a large, new brickstructure well off the street, facing the water. Terraced up infront, the property afforded at the top a stunning view of thebusy harbor. As one stood and gazed, there was nothing to impedethe vista out to Naugus Head save the long reach of Derby Wharf.The foreground of the harbor as seen from the house provided alively tableau, as if to illustrate the sentiments expressed inWashington’s remarks spoken earlier. At Derby Wharf a large EastIndiamen, which had arrived earlier that day from the waterseast of the Cape of Good Hope, was berthed and off-loading, herkeep embedded in harbor mud. A roar of incessant noise rose from








HDT WHAT? INDEX

the docks –shouted orders, creaking windlasses, shriekingseagulls, the cacophony of vessels under construction fromnearby shipyards– while prostitutes beckoned to sailors fromnearby windows and the aromas of cinnamon, clove, coffee, tea,and pepper wafted on the strong-smelling sea air at low tide.Crew members shouldered bags of sugar from Île de France(Mauritius) and bolts of cotton from India to be weighed on thecustoms scale and the merchant’s scale, while dunnage nowstacked by the merchantman’s bow had been packed around thecargo as a preventative against its shifting in bad weather.Berthed just forward of the off-loading ship was a coastingschooner having its hull coppered; behind Derby’s counting houseand warehouse on the wharf itself, a lumber schooner was puttingin at shipyard with a load of timber. Down the harbor anothermerchantman was docked in front of the large, striking, andsomewhat eccentric dwelling later to be known as the House ofthe Seven Gables, and beyond it was planned a great finger ofconstruction reaching into the harbor just where it widened. Itwas to be called India Wharf or Crowninshield Wharf, dependingon one’s preference, and it promised to rival that of CaptainGeorge Crowninshield’s arch-competitor Mr. Elias Haskins Derby,who owned by far the most prominent of Salem’s swelling numberof wharves. Coaches plied the narrow waterfront streets seekingfares from among the shore parties of the several visitingfrigates. In the early evening, with powdered hair and dressedin a black velvet suit with gold buckles, yellow gloves, a cockedhat with an ostrich plume in one hand, and a sword in a whiteleather scabbard, President Washington arrived at the AssemblyHall on Federal Street, where a party was already gathered. Likethe courthouse across town, another notable building of thisenlightened day, the hall with its noble Federalist lines wasan anomalous structure flanked by gambrel-roofed houses; for ithad been built only a few years before expressly for the socialevents of Salem’s most prominent citizens. On this evening theproud building beamed with neoclassical confidence and promiseof intoxicating possibilities. The Reverend Dr. William Bentley,the local chronicler who kept a finger on Salem’s pulse, notedthe scene glowing beneath the candlelit chandeliers with gentleirony: “The ladies were numerous and brilliant, the gentlemenwere also numerous!” Washington confided to his diary that therewere a hundred handsome, well-dressed people assembled to payhim homage. The cream of Salem’s society parted for thepresidential party entering the hall, withdrawing left to rightwith curtsies and bows, as the lofty guest of honor was escortedto a fine armchair at the end of the spacious room offered forthe occasion by Mr. Derby and his wife, Elizabeth CrowninshieldDerby. French tapestries and portraits of persons and shipsadorned the walls; fine silver, crystal, and porcelain piecesgraced the tables and hunt boards; Khotan, Samarkand, and Tabrizcarpets decorated the floor. In one corner hung a highlypolished mahogany spice cabinet where the precious condimentswere kept under lock and key. There followed an evening ofdancing until the distinguished visitor retired at nine, as itwas his custom to rise at five, but not before promising well-wishers that he would be riding out into Essex County at eightthe next morning to inspect a new bridge. The festivities







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continued late into the evening, for if the citizens of Salemknew one thing apart from diligence and hard work, it was howto live and enjoy themselves. One of the most sedate of therevelers was Elias Hasket Derby Sr., who had lent the hall forthe evening. Mr. Derby was a bold, visionary maritime merchantand the head of Salem’s most prosperous family, a house that hademerged from the Revolution measurably richer, with Derby’sprivateers having captured nearly 150 British prizes at a profitof one million dollars. “King” Derby has been described as “atall man, of fine figure and elegant carriage. His deportmentwas grave and dignified, his habits regular and exact.” Hiscontemporaries were especially struck by his eyes, for one wasblue, the other brown, and the arresting contrast is vividlyrevealed in a contemporary portrait. The son of Richard Derby,he had entered his father’s business at age fifteen not by wayof the quarterdeck, which was the normal way to begin amerchant’s career, but with the account books in the countinghouse. His sons John and Elias Hasket Jr. and other prominentcaptains and merchants, known as “Derby’s Boys,” would serve asimilar apprenticeship. By the age of thirty-three in 1772, hewas running the business, and after his father’s death at war’send, when Derby was forty-four, he had complete authority overthe port’s greatest merchant house, with wharf, warehouses,stores, a distillery, brigs, and ships: all without ever havingbeen to sea or abroad. Refitting his privateers as merchantmen,he began to broaden his vision, being the first Salem merchantto dispatch ships to such distant ports as Calcutta, Bombay,Madras, and Manila. An innovator, Derby established for Salemships the role of supercargo, or traveling business agent. Hewas most likely the first American merchant to send ships to seawith coppered bottoms. Having envisioned a centralized globaltrade network and developed a system that allowed theconsignment of cargoes to a foreign house, he relieved hissupercargos of the task of dealing with a succession of buyers.His life was lived in luxury, a style mostly promoted by hiswife. The most envied man in Salem, he was also the luckiest,having lost but one ship at sea during his entire career. In theapproaching decade, the 1790s, one third of the vessels out ofSalem to round the Cape of Good Hope were to be Derby’s vessels.Dr. Bentley wrote with some awe of America’s first millionaire,“Wealth with full tide flows on in that man.” Other merchantslooked to Derby as an example to follow in Far Eastern trade.Derby, unsurprisingly, had his enemies present that evening,most notably Captain George Crowninshield, the patriarch of arival clan of seafarers and from whose family had come Derby’sown wife. Crowninshield’s rise in the merchant arena had beenquick, aggressive, and occasionally litigious. Moreover, theCrowninshields were Republicans, an affront to the aristocratic,Federalist Derbys. Crowninshield had been a captain for RichardDerby before the Revolution and was described as a “bluff, warm-hearted chivalrous seaman” and “a son of nature [with powers]such as are employed only in seafaring.” George Crowninshieldhad a toughness that matched his ambition, and both thesequalities helped to elevate his firm to a competitive level withthat of Elias Haskins Derby. His five sons who followed him inthe family business were diverse and complemented their father’s








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character. Each had mastered navigation at age twelve, sailedto the East Indies at fifteen, and captained a ship by agetwenty. After independence their father began acquiring shipsof his own, much to Derby’s displeasure, who branded theCrowninshields as “base plebeians” and “sons of pride.” Derbybrought a suit against his brother-in-law for a wharf thatextended too far into the channel, causing the bottom adjacentto his own wharf to silt in. After an acrimonious contest, Derbyprevailed. A court decision forced Crowninshield to removetwelve feet of his wharf, fueling the animosity. Bitternessbetween the patriarchs was so rife that when ElizabethCrowninshield Derby died in 1799, not one Crowninshield attendedthe funeral. Henry David Thoreau undoubtedly had these twodynamic families in mind when he described the ideal merchantin WALDEN; OR, LIFE IN THE WOODS, published over a half century later,in 1854: “If your trade ... demands a universal knowledge.” Manyof Salem’s maritime achievements and domestic conflicts were tobe embodied in these rival dynasties of Derbys andCrowninshields, whose fates were intertwined throughcollaboration and competition in trade, politics, and marriage.Their story is the story of a growing Salem, for the two familiesgave great and lasting shape to an American city whosedevelopment is indelibly linked to the East Indies pepper trade.

British colonists planted clove trees in Panang. (By the following year the English would have gained control over all the Dutch East Indian possessions and their spice trade, with the exception of Java.)

The Derby ship America brought to Salem from Île de France (Mauritius) an elephant that had been procured there for $450, and that sold here for $10,000. Good elephant! It drank port and would pick pockets for pieces of bread, but would not allow itself to be ridden. Good elephant!10

1795

10. We do not have a record of whether this was an African elephant or an Indian one, but since Indian elephants are smaller and easier to transport, and since Charles Darwin would take an elephant ride while on the island of Mauritius and tourists typically can ride on an Indian elephant but not so readily on an African one, in all likelihood this was an Indian one. The issue would be, was this the same female as would arrive in the port of New-York on the America during the following year, or a different one.

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http://www.kouroo.info/kouroo/WALDEN/WALDEN.html



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November 3, Tuesday: The 120-ton schooner Rajah was fitted out in a Salisbury shipyard on the Merrimack River, and registered on this day with William Peele, Jonathan Peele, and Ebenezer Beckner as its owners and Jonathan Carnes as its master. It cleared for “India,” a destination which at that time was so vague as to include among other areas the East Indies. The ship carried four cannon and her primary cargo out consisted of 12 tons of bog iron ingots. Even the ten seamen aboard her had no knowledge that their destination was Sumatra, and that the commodity that they would be seeking would be pepper. (Peppercorns were not the gastronomical obsession in the American colonies that it was in Europe. When the Salem merchants would begin to profit enormously in that trade, it would be by supplying the peppercorns of Sumatra to European markets.)

An English fleet captured Ambon in the Spice Islands. Captain Jonathan Carnes of Salem, Massachusetts secretly sailed his schooner Rajah to Sumatra to acquire bulk pepper. According to Charles Corn’s THE SCENTS OF EDEN: A HISTORY OF THE SPICE TRADE (NY: Kodansha America, 1999), pages 242-4:

The origins of Captain Carnes’s voyage of 1796 may be found inan earlier expedition. In December 1785 Elias Hasket Derby,shipowner, had sent the Grand Turk, commanded by the twenty-seven-year-old former privateersman Ebenezer West, around theCape of Good Hope to Île de France (Mauritius). Though she wasthe first American ship to stop there, her captain found littleenthusiasm from the natives for his cargo of butter, fish,flour, rice, and rum, and trading proceeded slowly. Approachedby a Frenchman to carry a cargo to Canton, West agreed, afterestablishing a base on Mauritius for future Salem expeditions.Sailing to Canton was an audacious move, for the ship was notinsured beyond Île de France, and West had only crude charts forthe unknown waters and the pirate-infested Straits of Malacca,through which no American ship had ever sailed. But although theshipowner, Derby, was not seaman himself, he was known fortrusting the judgment of an enterprising shipmaster and givinghim his head. Captain West steered northeast through unknownwaters for China, dreaming of an unprecedented fortune from theEast. Arriving at the mouth of South China’s Pearl Rivers inSeptember 1786, Captain West learned that the Grand Turk was NewEngland’s first vessel to reach China. With a difficult voyagebehind him, West faced another arduous task in meeting thecomplex trade regulations and customs of the Chinese, anelaborate ceremony of bribes and fees. The English East IndiaCompany had established a factory here a hundred years earlier,followed later by the French and Dutch; by an imperial decreeof 1757, Canton had been made China’s sole port for foreigntrade. But there were tensions. Already the Honourable Company’sexportation of opium from India to China was beginning to alarmChinese authorities by its reversal of a trade balance hithertofavorable to them. This sinister commerce would lead eventuallyto the rise of Hong Kong as a deepwater port, the Opium Wars,and Lord Ashley’s parliamentary denunciation in 1843 that suchtrade “was utterly inconsistent with the honour and duty of aChristian kingdom.” Despite the frictions, however, Canton in

1796

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1785, with its coveted Chinese products of porcelains, teas,silks, and rhubarb, was the choice port of call for Westerntraders. A “celestial representative,” or customs inspector,boarded to sail the ship upstream to Whampoa Reach, a wideningin the river twelve miles south of the port proper. Here thecargo was unloaded and carried upriver in sampans threadingtheir way through junks and tea-deckers to Canton Harbor, wherethe shallow-drafted vessels were unloaded at factories. “Newpeople,” as visitors were known, were restricted to these walledcompounds of warehouses called hongs, where goods were storedand negotiations conducted through one of a dozen imperiallyappointed Chinese merchants, in this case a man known as Pinqua.William Vans was West’s supercargo, or traveling business agent,and it was his responsibility to purchase goods. Soon the ship’shold was filled with diverse teas transported in boxes fromeight hundred miles inland on the backs of porters, crates ofporcelain, and sacks of cassia (Chinese cinnamon). With a loadedship and the issue of the grand chop certifying that all dutiesand taxes were paid, the Grand Turk was cleared for Captain Westto sail downriver. The ship returned to Salem Harbor in May 1787to a thunderous welcome, with gun salutes and crowds cheeringover the exotic cargo. Derby had tripled his investment on apioneering voyage, and the gaze of Salem seafarers was suddenlyto the Far East.

July 25, Tuesday: Nicholas Marcellus Hentz was born in Versailles, France where for political reasons the family was living under the name Arnold.

The Salem Gazette reported the return to the port of New-York of the Rajah under Captain Jonathan Carnes with a full load of bulk pepper from Sumatra. The dried seeds had been shoveled into her hold like coal, and weighed out at an astonishing 150,000 pounds. Since pepper pound for pound was worth about as much as gold, there was considerable celebration. Investors would make a 700% profit, spawning investment by other Salem merchants and injecting the United States into the world spice trade (this Salem-based trade would flourish until 1856, creating some of the first great US fortunes).

July: The Rajah, reconfigured as a brig rather than a schooner, sailed again from Salem. This time it would return, in October 1799, with 158,544 pounds of Sumatran pepper. (And again, in July 1801, it would bring back 149,776 pounds.)

1797

1798

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February 20, Wednesday: The America, under Captain Benjamin Crowninshield, cleared Salem harbor for the East Indies, in a search for the unknown source of the pepper riches which had been brought home by the Rajah. It would return with 95,000 pounds bought at higher prices in Bengal, where it did not grow. Soon afterward, however, Sumatra would no longer be a secret.

October: The Rajah appeared in Salem harbor with a cargo of 158,544 pounds of Sumatran pepper.

November 25, Tuesday: Krishna Pal, a 36-year-old Indian carpenter, suffered a dislocated arm, and was treated by Dr. John Thomas, the first missionary to India from the Baptist Missionary Society. Dr. Thomas, along with the Reverend Joshua Marshman, spoke with this Indian worker about religion. Soon Krishna Pal embraced the Christian faith.

The Belisarius under Captain Samuel Skerry, Junior sailed from Salem harbor toward the distant destination of the Spice Islands.

1799

1800

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At this point Ambon, Banda, and Ternate of the Spice Islands were in the hands of the English rather than the Dutch. However, the sinister Frenchman Pierre Poivre (he had lost his right arm to a cannonball) would soon be succeeding in his agenda to smuggle eleven nutmeg seedlings and some clove seeds out of the region, thus

ending the monopoly, and the high prices that resulted from the monopoly, of these commodities forever. (Note that this might have happened at any earlier time — and the history of colonialism would have been vastly different. Why had this not happened earlier? –There were doubts that the trees could survive elsewhere, export of seedlings was under the Dutch a crime punishable by a horrible death, and the nutmeg seeds were being shelled, coated with lime, and roasted prior to export.)

July: The Rajah appeared in Salem harbor with a cargo of 149,776 pounds of Sumatran pepper.

1801

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The "Black Rose."



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July 30, Thursday: The Essex Register reported:

Arrived the fast-sailing and well-known “Belisarius,” CaptainSamuel Skerry, Junior, one hundred and two days from Bencoolen,having performed the voyage in the short time of eight monthsand three days, as she sailed from Salem, November 25, 1800....It is supposed that the “Belisarius” has made the shortestvoyage to the East Indies that was ever made from this country.

July 31, Friday: In Athens, Lord Elgin began removing sculptures from the Parthenon for transport to London. Everything he put his hand on would be known, collectively, as “the Elgin Marbles.”

December 25, Sunday: On his way home after an extended voyage to Sumatra, Nathaniel Bowditch sailed his Putnam into the harbor of Salem and tied up at the dock in an intense snowstorm in the middle of the night, with perfect zero visibility. He had been able to make a sight of the sun some two days before and had been confident he knew where he and his ship were in the dark waters off New England. At the entrance to the harbor, there had been a few seconds in which the white curtain of falling snow had rifted and he and his officers had managed to catch one glimpse of a light which he knew could only be the one on Baker’s Island. As he walked through the streets of Salem on his way to home and family, he was recognized, and the town assumed –since no ship could conceivably have come into the rock-bound and poorly mapped harbor under these conditions– that Captain Bowditch had been shipwrecked somewhere along the coast.11 After this last successful voyage, Bowditch would sell the Putnam and be appointed Inspector of Journals for the East India Marine Society.

[SEE NEXT SCREEN: WOULD THIS BE AN IMPORTANT PARADIGM

FOR THE JOURNAL OF THOREAU, OF HIS LIFE’S VOYAGE IN CONCORD WATERS??]

1803

11. On February 24, 1817, the Union, returning to Salem harbor with a cargo of Sumatran pepper and of tin, would attempt this same stunt in a thick snowstorm, but Captain William Osgood would vacillate and lose way and ram hard aground on the northwest point of Baker’s Island — littering the beach there with his spoiled riches.

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Since its formation, the East India Marine Society had beencollecting journals of its voyages. The basic purpose of thesociety was to acquire nautical information, and to get thisinformation the society had blank journals printed and boundfor the use of members. Each member starting a voyage tookalong a journal to record his trip. In the volume theshipmaster was supposed to keep an account of wind andweather, note landfalls, set down the latitude and longitudeof out-of-the-way places not fixed on charts, give weightsand measures and exchange rates of foreign ports, and makeany comments he wished on practically anything else thatmight be helpful to other members of the society.

The society looked on Bowditch as its most scholarly member,the one most capable of examining the journals and notinginformation that should be called to the attention of othershipmasters. And, in fact, his orderly, critical mind madehim an ideal inspector.

These journals were considered most important, as thecomprehensive directions for keeping them testified. Thesedirections, in addition to calling on members of the societyfor nautical information, also stated:

There should be collected, for the Museum, specimens ofvarious kinds of vegetable substances, earths, minerals,ores, metals, volcanic disturbances, &c. There should alsobe preserved such parts of birds, insects, fish &c. as servemost easily to distinguish them, and if no part can bepreserved, a description of any that are remarkable may begiven. Inquiry should be made of any remarkable books inuse, among any of the eastern nations, with their subjects,dates and titles. Articles of the dress and ornaments ofany nation, with the images and objects of religiousdevotion, should be procured.

This was quite a tall order, one that was never completelyfilled, since no shipmaster is known to have brought home avolcanic disturbance. Nevertheless, the order was filled tosuch a degree that war clubs and spears, ceremonial axes,feathered headdresses, armor of medieval Asiatic warriors,carved ivory, and imperial yellow robes were brought intoport along with barrels, bales, and sacks of merchandise. Inthe course of years the shipmasters belonging to the EastIndia Marine Society of Salem collected musical instrumentsfrom Arabia, stone images from Java, swords ornamented withhuman hair from Borneo, wooden bowls used at cannibal feastsin Fiji, a hideous wooden idol from sacred ground in Hawaii.

It was a grisly and fascinating collection, this array ofimages of heathen gods, of heathen weapons. Indian templebells could be rung on New England shores, and drums madefrom human skulls could be thumped in Salem. The museumfounded by the East India Marine Society grew until, yearslater, it had art objects long after they had disappearedfrom the islands on which they had originated, and figuresof strange gods long after they had been forgotten by thetribes who had carved them. The curios were put on displayin the society’s headquarters on Essex Street in a big roomarranged for the exhibit, with a painting of the landing ofthe Pilgrims on one chimney and on another a portrayal of thelaunching of the Essex. Some of the loot hung on the walls;some of it was in glass cases. The heathen idols stood.





Berry, Robert Elton. YANKEE STARGAZER: THE LIFE OF NATHANIEL BOWDITCH. New York: Whittlesey House, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1941. Pages 150-1



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In this year the first of 30 volumes of the “Voyages of Humboldt and Bonpland” was going through a press in Germany. These volumes would include the 1st accurate maps and records of climate, geology, and measurements of the earth’s magnetic field, pertaining to the western hemisphere. Humboldt’s personal observations of many different plant habitats resulted in his important generalizations about the relationships of plants to their native climates. He is probably best known for making ecological correlations between the different plant habitats observed with rising elevation and the changing habitats seen when traveling from the tropics to arctic regions. Publication of his ESSAI SUR LA GÉOGRAPHIE DES PLANTES... may be considered the beginning of the science of ecology.

At some point during this year of a battle at Trafalgar, which was a British naval victory, and one at Austerlitz, which was a victory of the Napoleonic army over Austro-Russian forces, Napoléon Bonaparte met this scientist Alexander von Humboldt (or vice versa). The words he dropped on him were with regard to the interests of Josefina Tascher Bonaparte, who was a mulatto from the Caribbean region:

This is a response very similar to the response which another ruler who ruled by ruling, President Richard Milhouse Nixon, would generate when he was warned by a visiting delegation of computer scientists that there would be a problem with computer dates as of the end of the millennium — unless something was promptly done to correct the Pentagon’s computer code. Our leader responded:

This may be an opportune point at which to introduce a fabled exchange between the First Consul and Pierre-Simon Laplace, because it was in this year that Laplace completed the 4th volume of his MÉCHANIQUE CÉLESTE and so presumably it would have been at this point that he presented this astronomical work. Napoléon asked some question about the role of deity in the universe, such as whether he needed to presume as Newton had presumed that God would from time to time adjust the machinery of the heavens to keep everything running in synch with everything. Laplace’s famous response went something like this: “Je n’avais pas besoin de cette hypothèse-là.”

During this year Napoleon not only crowned himself as King of Italy but also abandoned the French revolutionary calendar — which might have offered our visiting delegation of computer scientists a hint as to what to do in regard to our Y2K situation but in fact did not.

The peak of the Sumatra/Salem pepper traffic; exports alone totaled 7,000,000 pounds in one year. It was at about this point that the body of a sailor was brought back home curing in the pepper, and upon arrival was uncovered as still looking “very natural.”

1805

PLANTS

You are interested in botany? So is my wife.

Something’s wrong with my TV. Can you fix it?

SPICE






Indeed the Empress Josephine was interested in botany, and in botanists. In fact, she would later provide a refuge for a lover and traveling companion of von Humboldt’s, Aime Bonpland, by appointing him keeper of her gardens, and of her confidences.

We have this on the testimony of one of the computer scientists who was in the Oval Office on that day. They were protesting that the Department of Defense shortsightedly was not allowing them to go from 2-digit dates to 4-digit dates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Simon_Laplace





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After the lifting of President Jefferson’s destructive embargo, the US pepper trade resumed, and reached a second peak in this year — before the War of 1812 closed it down again.

June: The Union, commanded by Captain William Osgood, cleared from Salem harbor bound for Sumatra.

February 24, Monday: The lookout aboard the Union, returning to Salem harbor with a cargo of Sumatran pepper and of tin, after midnight sighted the Thatcher’s Island light through a thick snowstorm, and the ship tacked to pass north of it. But should there be one light, or two? Perhaps this was instead the Boston light, and if so they should be steering to the south of it! During the second-guessing, Captain William Osgood gave a command to helm down, and then the ship was unable to regain her course and rammed hard aground on the northwest point of Baker’s Island. Although all hands would survive, the beaches of Baker’s Island would be littered with salt-spoiled peppercorns, and scavengers would be salvaging an occasional box or tin for months to come.12

Friend Elizabeth Fry wrote in her journal:

I have lately been occupied in forming a school in Newgate forthe children of the poor prisoners as well as the youngcriminals, which has brought much peace and satisfaction withit; but my mind has also been deeply affected in attending apoor woman who was executed this morning. I visited her twice;this event has brought me into much feeling by somedistressingly nervous sensations in the night, so that this hasbeen a time of deep humiliation to me, this witnessing the effectof the consequences of sin. The poor creature murdered her baby;and how inexpressibly awful now to have her life taken away....Newgate Prison and myself are becoming quite a show, which is a

1810

1816

1817

12. When Nathaniel Bowditch had attempted this same feat on December 25, 1803, he had gotten away with it cold. But not just everybody could pull off the stuff that Bowditch could pull off!

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very serious thing. I believe that it certainly does much goodto the cause in spreading amongst all ranks of society aconsiderable interest in the subject, also a knowledge of theSociety of Friends and of their principles.

The first US spice grinding operation began its processing, in Boston.

After decades of battles between the Dutch and English over control of the East Indian spice trade, a formal treaty gave the Dutch control of the Malay Archipelago, minus North Borneo. The British were settled with North Borneo, the Malay mainland, India, Ceylon, and Singapore.

January: Capture by Malay pirates of the Friendship, and the murder of five members of its crew: the worst tragedy in the history of the pepper trade between Salem and Sumatra (the US Navy would of course retaliate).

1821

1824

1831

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Elizabeth Wright’s LICHEN TUFTS, FROM THE ALLEGHANIES. Eventually Lawrence Buell, cherchezing for the femme on page 45 of THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION, would discover the gender of this author to have been of interest:

John Gould Veitch sent 17 new species of conifer from Japan to England, as well as seed and plants of other horticulturally valuable stock. His most popular introduction from that trip, however, became Boston ivy, Parthenocissus tricuspidata.

Using a pseudonym, E. Douwes Dekker published his novel MAX HAVELAAR. A former Dutch Colonial Officer in Java, Dekker in this book revealed the inhumane treatment of native workers in Dutch East Indian colonies. The resulting arousal of public concern would force governmental reforms. The Dutch would retain control of Javan and Sumatran spice production until WWII.

The Tufts College Alumni Association was formed.

Victoria and Albert visited Oxford privately, to find out how Edward, Prince of Wales was faring at Christ

1860

The first fictional recreation of Thoreau was by a woman, LouisaMay Alcott (MOODS). The first book, to my knowledge, published byan outsider to the transcendentalist circle that celebrates natureas a refuge from hypercivilization with explicit invocation ofThoreau as model and precursor was written by a woman: ElizabethWright’s LICHEN TUFTS, FROM THE ALLEGHANIES (1860). The firstThoreau Society was founded by a group of young women (1891)....

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Church.








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T.S. Mort of Sydney, Australia created the 1st machine-chilled cold-storage unit, thus relegating spices to the role of flavor-enhancement rather than the role of preservation. Louis Pasteur challenged the theory of spontaneous generation of M. Félix Archimède Pouchet, Director of the Museum of Natural History at Rouen, that organic beings are spontaneously generated about us constantly through the processes of putrefaction, by putting forth an entirely naturalistic theory of fermentation that involved the agency of “germs,” which is to say, pre-existing germinal particles.

The Dutch declared war upon the Acehnese.

1861

1871

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A generous bequest by C.S. Sargent and H.H. Hunnewell would allow Professor Asa Gray to retire from his teaching duties and work fulltime on his NORTH AMERICAN FLORA.

The navel orange was brought from Brasil in 1870 by Saunders and given to the USDA for use as grafting stock for the industry. Riverside resident Mrs. Luther Tibbets received two especially successful trees from which propagation material was taken. Her plants may be the source for all navel orange trees in North America today.

By the end of the Dutch war on the Acehnese, piracy and native hostility had finally been snuffed out in America’s direct pepper trade with Sumatra, and the 967th of the 967 pepper voyages was completed.

Sander built his first greenhouse at St. Albans, England. His firm began a system of tracking orchid hybrid (grex) names that would later be institutionalized by the Royal Horticultural Society.

Legislation created Yellowstone, the 1st National Park.

The USDA section on Seed and Plant Introduction was formed, with David Fairchild as the “Explorer in Charge.”

The last of Salem’s proud square-riggers was repurposed, as a coal barge.

Having discovered major improprieties in bourbon production, the US Congress passed the Bottled-in-Bond Act, controlling bourbon production at the source and setting standards for proof and aging.

The American Spice Trade Association was formed.

1873

1897

1907

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During the mid-1950s, hurricanes hitting the New England coast decimated many of the vacant, decaying, flimsily constructed military structures on various of the islands of Boston harbor, such as the POW barracks of the World War II detainment camp for Italians at Fort Andrews on Peddocks Island.

During this year “Hurricane Diane” so badly damaged the ugly and inappropriate concrete bridge over the Concord River on the site of the Old North Bridge, joining the Battle Monument on the east bank to the Daniel

1955







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Chester French statue of “The Minuteman” on the west bank, that the sturdy structure would need to be demolished. In the following year a replica of the original bridge would be erected, based upon the Amos Doolittle engraving of the 1775 battle.

There is further indication of the wrath of “Diane” near the present Causeway Bridge, just below the Ox-Bow of the Sudbury River, where you can still see the remains of a stone bridge. The western end of this “Stone’s Bridge” (erected in 1857 and discussed by Thoreau in 1859 as a new bridge) was taken out, though the ox-bow upstream endured through this flood still intact.

As the waters surged down the Blackstone River they took out all its bridges except one — the stone bridge anchored in bedrock that can be seen just below the dam.

The above has to do only with the hurricanes that came ashore in New England. There were other damaging hurricanes. For instance, in this year hurricane Janet destroyed 75% of the nutmeg trees of Grenada. This








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represented, at the time, 40% of the world’s nutmeg supply.

In Hong Kong, the Governor was Sir Murray MacLehose.

Spice trading with China was reopened as the US ended its 21-year embargo.

US domestic production of spices reached 30% of total US spice consumption for the 1st time.

String trimmers were introduced.

Robert Helmer MacArthur’s GEOGRAPHICAL ECOLOGY.

World trade in black pepper set an all-time high of 220 million pounds.

The G6 group was created to bring together the leaders of the biggest national economies (USA, Canada, Britain, Germany, Japan, France).

1971

1972

1976

SPICE

SPICE

SPICE





http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_MacArthur



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The American Spice Trade Association completed its first complete nutritional analysis of spices.The

perfectly preserved corpse (from the 2nd century BC) of the wife of the Marquis of Tai was found in Ch’ang-sha. In addition to melon seed discovered in her intestines, the tomb contained a bowl of peaches. Belief since the Ch’in Dynasty held that peaches “eaten in time” would preserve the body from deterioration forever. This custom survives today in the tradition of shoutao — the long life peach — a steamed roll served on birthdays.

During this year and the following one, Deng Xiaoping was emerging as the preeminent leader of China.

For the 1st time, spice usage in the US passed the half billion pound mark.

Hundreds of people in Spain became sick and died from consuming cheap olive oil that had been adulterated with French rapeseed oil. The rapeseed oil contained industrial aniline dyes and had been manufactured only for use in steel mills.

1977

1981

SPICE

PLANTS

PLANTS








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With some 750,000 bathing visits to the pond per year, the urine content of the waters of Walden Pond was greater than that of any other fresh waters in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.

Kary B. Mullis devised the polymerase chain reaction, a system to replicate large quantities of DNA from a small initial sample. The ability to create a large sample of DNA for testing and study had extraordinary impact on various fields of study, from areas of paleobiology to forensic analysis.

Barbara McClintock received the Nobel Prize for her work with the complex color patterns of Indian corn, studies that revealed moveable genetic elements termed “jumping genes.”

A British study discovered powdered ginger to be twice as effective as Dramamine in the prevention of Motion Sickness.

When the US invaded Grenada, nutmeg production there ceased and world prices temporarily escalated.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration published rules for gamma irradiation of spices.

1983

1984

PLANTS

SPICE

SPICE







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Taking a page from an old book, the Indonesian Nutmeg Association agreed to market all their product through the Catz International B.V. headquartered in Rotterdam — an action which resulted in a new monopoly and increased prices.

COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others,such as extensive quotations and reproductions ofimages, this “read-only” computer file contains a greatdeal of special work product of Austin Meredith,copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials willeventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup someof the costs of preparation. My hypercontext buttoninvention which, instead of creating a hypertext leapthrough hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems—allows for an utter alteration of the context withinwhich one is experiencing a specific content alreadybeing viewed, is claimed as proprietary to AustinMeredith — and therefore freely available for use byall. Limited permission to copy such files, or anymaterial from such files, must be obtained in advancein writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo”Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Pleasecontact the project at <[email protected]>.

Prepared: November 23, 2013

1987

NUTMEG

SPICE

“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over untiltomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

– Remark by character “Garin Stevens”in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST







Well, tomorrow is such and such a date and so it began on that date in like 8000BC? Why 8000BC, because it was the beginning of the current interglacial -- or what?

Bearing in mind that this is America, "where everything belongs," the primary intent of such a notice is to prevent some person or corporate entity from misappropriating the materials and sequestering them as property for censorship or for profit.



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ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT

GENERATION HOTLINE

This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by ahuman. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request wehave pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out ofthe shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). Whatthese chronological lists are: they are research reportscompiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data moduleswhich we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining.To respond to such a request for information, we merely push abutton.







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Commonly, the first output of the program has obviousdeficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modulesstored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, andthen we need to punch that button again and do a recompile ofthe chronology — but there is nothing here that remotelyresembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know andlove. As the contents of this originating contexture improve,and as the programming improves, and as funding becomesavailable (to date no funding whatever has been needed in thecreation of this facility, the entire operation being run outof pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweakingand recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation ofa generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward andupward in this brave new world.

First come first serve. There is no charge.Place your requests with <[email protected]>.Arrgh.







Ternate and Tidore - Kouroo · TERNATE AND TIDORE... ” Ternate and Tidore WALDEN: Thus it appears that the sweltering inhabitants of Charleston and New Orleans, of Madras and Bombay

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